Other Possibilities

Liberals believe we’re all in the same boat.  Conservatives believe it’s every man for himself.  Liberals value compassion.  Conservatives value hard work.  Liberals believe that capitalism is destroying the earth, and human civilization.  Conservatives call

We have the resources. We have the technology. We have the manpower.

liberals communists.

Now, I don’t believe, like Obama believes, that we can actually meet the conservatives somewhere in the middle.  If this were a tug of war, our team would already be well into the mud pit and giving any more ground means we lose.  Completely.

But, since it’s obvious that neither communism or capitalism work very well, I think it’s time we started looking around for some other alternatives.  The world is certainly too interconnected for any sort of tribalism, monarchy was found wanting centuries ago and that little inbreeding problem they had has not gone away, and theocracies are just no fun at all.  Benevolent dictatorships are never benevolent for long, and they always end in a coup, in which people sometimes get hurt.

Meritocracy and technocracy haven’t really been tried, but they have the same problem as any democracy – who’s going to be in charge, and how can we trust them?

Here’s my suggestion.  I call it baseline capitalism.  I would call it communism lite, but communism summons up images of gulags, closed borders and supermarkets with empty shelves, and pretty much nobody who’s lived in a communist country wants to go back to that, no matter how good the health care is.

Build up the infrastructure so that everybody in the world has clean drinking water, hot and cold running water for showers, and enough desalinated H2O to water their crops.  That part shouldn’t be all that expensive.  Less than the U.S. military budget for a year, I’m sure.  If everybody in the world who has over $100 million would chip in 10% of their net worth (leaving the poorest of them with $90 million), it could be done in style.  Then, you feed everybody in the world and take care of the unemployment problem by giving land grants along that water supply system – out in the desert, where nobody lives now – creating a system of small farms that would be self sustaining after the first growing season.  Fuck Monsanto.

Of course, there would still have to be some taxes, to pay for universal health care, education and some other stuff, so the rest of the world could be as nice as Sweden, but beyond that, once the basic needs are sorted, let the rich people get as rich as they want.  It seems like a fair compromise.

We really don’t want to have to bring out the guillotines.